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In The Plotting Shed

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Wednesday, 31 January 2018

I have a confession to make...

It's been a traumatic time.

Driven by a desire to bring all my books up to the writing standard I hope I have now acquired through diligent application, hard work and the help of many others, cleverer and more skilled than me, I have re-edited all the books in The Katherine Wheel Series.

Of course, it was partly procrastination. With all the joyous busyness of last Christmas, when both our kids came home and we got together after a bit of a bruising year, the current work in production (WIP) got left behind.
Instead of cracking on with it, I came up with this brainwave of tidying up the ones that preceded it. For those writers among you reading this, you will understand the many and varied ways most writers will employ to put off the moment of returning to the very hard work of a first draft.
Woodbine and Ivy is a challenging project, because of the research about the second World War involved but also because it has to pull all the threads left hanging in the last book, Speedwell, together into a magnificent (we are talking aspirations here) emotionally satisfying ending.
It took the best part of 2 weeks, some days working 12 hours a day, to get those edits accomplished and I was horrified at some of my punctuation and lack of speech tags! I have learned a lot in these last five years since I published The Twisted Vine, my debut book. But, the task was hugely satisfying and I felt vindicated when Daffodils rose significantly in the charts, and is still doing so, ever since.
Phew - so - nothing else for it but to return to the first draft of the complex story that will be Woodbine and Ivy. Then my computer started playing up. Wouldn't switch on enthusiastically, would sometimes accept the internet, sometimes not, graphics played up - all very scary. I decided I had to buy a new one soon.
In uploading the paperback of Speedwell onto its publishing forum, I needed to get my dear husband to do some tricky formatting that I could not make this temperamental computer accept. He has a gift for technology that I sadly lack.

We'd just had a lovely romantic candlelit meal. He is left handed and pushed the computer to a different angle. I went away and left him to it. When I came back, the candle flame had burnt a hole through the back of the screen.
Although it was ten o'clock at night, I had to walk up the garden for some deep breathing.
I decided I had to buy a new computer the next day.
Transferring files, bookmarks and all the familiar sites and comfort zones, let alone remembering all the passwords, was a nightmare. I now have three cloud spaces and one external hard drive with all my stuff on it. I never want to repeat the trauma!

And do you know what? Somehow,
through all of this panic and mayhem, I have managed to squeeze out 5000 new words into that first draft of Woodbine and Ivy. The scenes I have written are full of tension and stress - maybe that computer disaster will bear fruit after all!